Those October evenings were very long and weary for Lesbia and her
sister. Lady Maulevrier read and mused in her low chair beside the fire,
with her books piled upon her own particular table, and lighted by her
own particular lamp. She talked very little, but she was always gracious
to her granddaughters and their governess, and she liked them to be with
her in the evening. Lesbia played or sang, or sat at work at her
basket-table, which occupied the other side of the fireplace; and
Fraeulein and Mary had the rest of the room to themselves, as it were,
those two places by the hearth being sacred, as if dedicated to
household gods. Mary read immensely in those long evenings, devouring
volume after volume, feeding her imagination with every kind of
nutriment, good, bad, and indifferent. Fraeulein Mueller knitted a woollen
shawl, which seemed to have neither beginning, middle, nor end, and was
always ready for conversation, but there were times when silence brooded
over the scene for long intervals, and when every sound of the light
wood-ashes dropping on the tiled hearth was distinctly audible.
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